The project comprises an unprecedented wholesale reinterpretation of the religious landscape of Ancient Greece in the archaic and classical periods (roughly 800 – 323 BCE). It will utilise a theoretical framework I have developed specifically for this study: ‘Haptic Belief’ (HB). This framework takes an interdisciplinary approach considering the emotional, sensory, and cognitive dimensions of religious and ritual practices.
It is easiest to study ancient Greek religion from an etic position, which privileges public practices over personal belief; this is predominantly due to our distance from ancient people and the issues inherent in studying the ancient past. It has been enabled by the prevalence of theoretical frameworks such as Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood’s Polis religion theory.[1] This theory posits that all religious practice is predicated on the polis (plural poleis, ‘city-states’). Within this framework, all religion, from privately held beliefs of individuals to large scale festivals at panhellenic sanctuaries, was mediated through the political entity of a person polis. At this time, the Greek world was made up of hundreds of independent poleis that were loosely connected by some shared culture, language, and religious practice. Thus, religion was ‘embedded’ within the political structure – that is, religion was deeply enmeshed with all other political, civic, and economic aspects of the city. Polis religion theorises that the most critical religious identity was based on citizenship, and the most important religious body was the city. Studies utilising this approach do not purposefully ignore the role of individual practices. Instead, they begin from the polis, where religion is primarily facilitated. Additionally, personal experiences are harder to reconstruct or interpret, even more so when we do not adequately understand the framework into which those individuals’ experiences fit.
Many of the studies that focus on polis-centred religion give us a framework within which to examine the individual in earnest. More recently, scholars have started to restate the importance of the individual,[2] even within the bounds of the polis. However, much of this work still presents studies based on the theory of polis religion, either with a simple acknowledgement of personal belief[3] or which offer a critique of polis religion in the context of individual faith.[4] While this has been a necessary step in the study of ancient religion, neither of these approaches captures the complexity of the interrelationship between public practice and personal belief. A complete picture of the religious landscape of Greece in the sixth to fourth centuries BCE requires a holistic re-examination of ancient Greek religion, encompassing both the public and personal spheres, with the individual as the foundation. This re-examination requires an entirely new theoretical framework.
Even at the most significant, politically motivated civic festivals, some individuals would have felt deeply devotional. The multitude of ideas and experiences expressed during these festivals would have ranged from deep piety to uninterested boredom. People do not learn religious ideology only during formal education but also through interpersonal relationships – relationships filled with emotion and sensation. My research into the young girls who serve Athena Polias (‘of the city’) has demonstrated this.[5] BBB will trace these personal experiences of public religion. In this project, I will look for the experiences of, for instance, the young girls who wove the dress offered to Athena, the young man training for victory at the games in honour of Zeus Olympias, and the politician who travels to Delphi as a sacred envoy to seek the god’s wisdom. Each of these individuals participates in an act of public religion. However, the things and words they leave behind reveal something about their personal beliefs, ideas, and feelings about the gods and their faith. In tracing the material remains of these beliefs, this project will give a new understanding of the religious – and therefore everyday – lives of individuals in ancient Greece.
Ancient Greek polytheism inherently contains a significant degree of individual autonomy in creating a bricolage of religious experiences through participation in various religious communities (rather than a single ‘church’, for further, see below). The interaction between, and interdependence of, the public and personal is not trivial but vital to our understanding of the function of religion in ancient Greek culture. However, such a study cannot be conducted solely from an etic position. I have therefore developed a new theoretical framework for studying ancient religion that also accounts for the emic position of the insider: Haptic Belief (HB).[6]
People’s experiences and interactions are delineated and enhanced by the objects, spaces, and traditions they encounter in their everyday world and the sensations and feelings of everyday life focused through the lens of religious practices. This occurs in three connected but distinct ways. The first is through personal belief, which cannot be perfectly replicated from person to person, but which hangs together through a system of coherences (that is, that people share common understandings about what things mean). The second is that ancient Greek religion is predominantly orthopraxic, or ‘right doing’. When one behaves correctly, they are accepted, regardless of their personal beliefs. Finally, religious communities are not static but fluid because ancient Greek religion allows individuals to retain a certain amount of autonomy in crafting their religious practice by participating in various public and private cults. Belonging in a religious community is similarly not a static experience – as one might belong to a single church, synagogue, or mosque. Thus, religious participation in the ancient Greek world becomes a bricolage of networked experiences, thoughts, beliefs, and practices. As I made clear in my 2020 monograph, Underworld Gods in Ancient Greek Religion: Death and Reciprocity, ‘communities formed around religious practice in the Greek world could exist in several overlapping ways, and individuals would necessarily belong to multiple different religious communities.[7] While a political identity is required for participation in some religious communities, others require different kinds of identity. These might include households and families, neighbourhoods, specific age or gender requirements, or more broadly encompassing like ‘Greek speaking’.
Objectives
BBB has four key objectives, which are as follows: 1) to explore the nexus of public and personal religious practice in ancient Greece, focusing on the period roughly 700-323 BCE; 2) to reveal how personal practice is integral to public religion; 3) to present a new theoretical framework for the study of ancient religious practice which will be available for use in broader contexts, both relating to other religious landscapes (e.g. Rome, Near Eastern contexts), and other socio-cultural aspects (e.g. politics, trade relationships); 4) to investigate how modern Hellenic polytheism can reveal sensory and emotional aspects of ancient religious worship.
Specific objectives relating to the branches of the project
Believing: To what extent is ‘personal’ and ‘public’ religious belief (and non-belief) co-dependant in an ancient polytheistic context? How does public religion impact personal belief? For instance, what kinds of personal religious experiences can be found through evidence of large-scale public festivals that are predominantly political? The question of how we can map personal belief amongst ancient populations has occupied scholars of ancient religion over the last decade. This part of the project will examine individual religious experiences, both in large and small-scale religious practices that are both public and private. Through investigation into situated and object-based practices, I will map the experiences of worshippers onto the emotive and sensory landscape of religious practice (including comparative studies with modern Hellenic polytheistic practices, see below). This section will examine belief and how we can discuss faith in the context of ancient Greek religion (where we cannot, for example, undertake direct ethnographic studies).
Indicative Case Study: Examining the religious, emotive, and sensory experiences of the two elite young girls who live on the Athenian Acropolis for a year in service to Athena’ Of the City’, in juxtaposition to the broader group of girls whose bodies are turned into ritual implements during ‘rites of passage’ undertaken at the cults of Artemis in the outskirts of Attic territory, including a consideration of the very specific and individual faith profile of girls who may undertake both ritual practices.
Behaving: How does the religious and non-religious behaviour of individuals impact the way that religion works in practice at the polis level, in smaller communities such as families and neighbourhoods, and in larger administrative and non-administrative centres of the ancient Greek world, including groups of federated poleis that share sanctuaries or at panhellenic sanctuaries open to all Greek speakers? This includes political, civic, military, economic, and community behaviours and behaviours we might consider more purely religions. Examples of the former involve learning ornate personal dedications in public view of holding elaborate and expensive funerary processions. In contrast, examples of the latter might include private households of daily individual worship. This section will examine how personal religion can be distinguished from public practices and what happens when those lines are blurred. I will examine the role of audience(s) in the function of personal dedications in the broader religious landscape. Finally, I will look at nonbelievers in ancient polytheistic practices and why orthopraxic behaviour is equally or perhaps more critical than orthodoxic belief.
Indicative Case Study: The largest body of material evidence for religious practice in the ancient Greek world comprises hundreds of thousands of small votive offerings left by individuals in publicly accessible sanctuaries. These are both, then, both private andpublic religious offerings. How do we account for the multi-layered audiences of these offerings, including the divine, the individual or group making the offerings, and other community members who encounter these offerings during their own worship? What is the difference between ‘publicly private’ rituals such as those that take place at public sanctuaries and the ‘privately private’ rituals which take place in households or closed-off community groups with no opportunity for outsiders to witness (either the ritual itself or the material remains of the ritual)?
Belonging: To what extent is public religion based on the idea of belonging to a community rather than a system of religious belief? What kinds of communities impacted religious belief and behaviour? In this section, I will investigate how religious participation promoted inclusion in public and private spaces. I will focus on political and military communities, public religious communities, and private religious communities with large-scale voluntary membership.
Indicative Case Study: Cases of individuals who might otherwise be considered ‘outsiders’ being included within communities for reasons of religious practice. For example, a Thracian man living in Eleusis in the mid-fourth century BCE was rewarded for his commitment to the local gods and festivals with financial and social privileges. These privileges were inscribed on a large tablet erected by the local municipal council in the area of the main sanctuary of the area – this demonstrates intentional religious behaviour leading to a direct social and fiscal gain and community inclusion, bearing out the argument that ancient Greek religion operated between civic and personal components.
Theoretical Framework
In its simplest form, haptics refers to touch. More than this, though, haptics ‘refers to the work of the hands – handling, caressing, grasping, manipulating, hitting, striking, and so on – as instruments of knowledge’.[8] Doing, as Aristotle noted,[9] is instrumental to learning. Doing with the body not only creates new knowledge but reinforces old knowledge. Moreover, as doing is instrumental to learning, it is also instrumental to teaching. In many modern religions, children learn religious activity through play – a form of low-stakes doing.[10] As Christina Toren comments, ‘our cognitive processes are constituted through our embodied engagement in the world.’[11] Knowledge-making in religious contexts is an inherently dynamic process necessitated by multi-directional relationships between the body and mind of the individual, the collective body and mind of the community, the situated environment, and the divine. The primary relationship is formed between the individual and the divine regardless of the number of intermediary layers; these layers – the community, environment, or other individuals – shape both the individual and the divine[12] in ways that neither can be independent from. That is, our experience of the world is facilitated by our experiences through the world. This facilitation is led primarily by sensory feedback. In this way, haptics relates not only to touch but to the feedback of touch: the things we use, the energy we expend making and moving, the environment we move in and through. Ancient Greek religion is both embodied and situated, and therefore needs to be examined in an embodied and situated way.
Thus, HB looks at how individuals experience religion physically, emotionally, and sensorily. HB is grounded in the material world and how individuals relate to it. Our understanding of material things shapes our understanding of the world. Using material culture as the foundation for studying the world can enable us to reconstruct ‘history from below’ – that is, the history of the everyday. Using and adapting material culture enables me to conduct material based ethnographic-style studies. In the absence of direct ethnographic studies, this allows us to investigate religion as it was experienced through the physical and literary remains of the culture. HB examines religion as it is ‘lived by people. This approach can help reconstruct ancient people’s lives by examining how they experienced and interacted with the world. Alongside applying a theoretical framework to the historical material, I will be undertaking a knowledge exchange partnership, culminating in a significant body of new research, with communities of modern Hellenic Polytheists, particularly those that identify as ‘Reconstructionist’. These communities, such as the Labrys Community of Athens, seek to reconstruct ancient religious practices as closely as possible. This is a heretofore underused opportunity for scholars of ancient religion to investigate the sensory and emotive dimensions of religious practice focused on the ancient Greek gods.
I have undertaken two pilot studies applying HB, with a third nearly complete. These will form the basis of the main project. The first, ‘Weaving for Athena: The Arrhephoroi, Panathenaia, and Mundane Acts as Religious Devotion’ (2019) looks at the process of weaving the dress dedicated to Athena in Athens annually at the Panathenaia, a festival designed to reassert the relationship between Athena and the Athenians, and which is politically motivated community ritual. The dress is made over a period of nine months by a group of women, whose bodies and time become the implements of secretive ritual practice. The second, ‘Procession and Representation on the Parthenon Frieze: A Haptic Response’ (forthcoming), examines the process of procession, using the Panathenaic procession as a case study. This study examines the way that different parts of the population may have experienced the same ritual in vastly different ways (e.g. the young girls who carried ritual implements at the beginning, some of whom were citizen girls and some resident foreigners, the magistrates who processed in their official capacities, the body of citizen men who joined the procession at the end, the audience of the procession). Finally, ‘Situated Ritual and Political Change in Fifth-Century Athenian Cults of Artemis: A View Over the Harbour’ (forthcoming) presents a re-examination of the use of site-situated experience in rituals dedicated to Artemis at her sanctuary overlooking Athens’s harbour and how the urbanisation of the area during the fifth century changed both the religious and political implications of the site and its rituals.
This project grows out of previous research conducted initially for my 2020 monograph Underworld Gods in Ancient Greek Religion, with a theoretical framework (HB) that has been refined in pilot studies listed above (see Theoretical Framework). Echoing the complex nature of religious practice, I will undertake a multi-layered analysis of the appropriate evidence, including historical and archival research, during which I will conduct a sustained analysis of the ancient textual, visual, and material evidence. This work aims to build a comprehensive dataset of religious practices across the Greek world in the archaic and classical periods. This dataset will be used to compile the sourcebook (see Dissemination Plan below). It will be managed through a dedicated Data Management Plan. This will be supplemented by site situated research trips to Greece and Italy undertaken throughout the fellowship period. Researching situated knowledge can be enhanced not only by visiting sites and undertaking approximations of, for example, long processional walks, particularly when done at appropriate times of the year.
This site-situated research will facilitate the close attention necessary to comprehensively analyse the project’s sources, allowing for the study of emotive and sensory aspects of religious practice that come together to establish religious communities in the ancient Greek world. I will consult contemporaneous textual, epigraphical, and visual material as part of the project’s primary analysis, predominantly using printed resources and online databases (e.g. Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum) and collections of inscriptional evidence (e.g. Inscriptiones Graecae, Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum), to conduct crucial contextual analysis. The analysis of religious sites and collated images, objects, and texts examined during my archival research will complement an ongoing survey of relevant secondary literature to be updated through the fellowship. This includes scholarship focused on the ancient Greek religious landscape and interdisciplinary studies of histories of religious practice, recent texts exploring intersections between emotion, sensation, material culture, and identity, Cognitive Science of Religion (including historical applications of CSR), work on religion and situated experience, social geography, and spatial sociology. In synthesising these varying intellectual approaches, the project will provide an innovative and interdisciplinary examination that is not limited by theoretical frameworks prevalent in the study of ancient history and the discipline of Classics.
As outlined above, the project adopts an innovative multidisciplinary approach to the study of ancient Greek religion. My novel theoretical framework, HB, adopts and adapts methods from various historical and ancient historical disciplines, cognitive science of religion and psychology, sociology, anthropology, and religious studies. In doing so, the project establishes a vital dialogue between often discrete disciplinary approaches. Material culture and site situated experience embodies – and is embedded within – religious practices, which occur through participation in the groups and institutions that make up the city’s civic, social, and private spheres. These groups share some, but not all, of their symbolic grammar and vocabulary, giving a person the ability to transfer concepts from one group into another without significant dissonance. HB differs from other material or sensorial methods because it crucially describes how the body becomes an object in the course of religious practice to define the embodied nature of religious practice in a system that is predominantly driven by tradition.
As part of the project, I will build a collaborative worship partnership with various communities of modern Hellenic polytheists to research and restage several key festivals and rites associated with the project. The purpose of this partnership is not to faithfully recreate the conditions of ancient religious practices but to investigate the emotive and sensory aspects of worship focused on the ancient Greek pantheon by engaging with adherents to Hellenic polytheism. Reconstruction has long been an accepted approach in archaeology and history research, but the controlled and academic reconstruction of events to investigate emotional and sensory responses is innovative. In the first instance, I will be approaching the Labrys Religious Community, a group that regularly practices Hellenic polytheists based in Athens who undertake personal and public religious activities. As the goal is collaborative knowledge exchange, I will approach this aspect of the project with as much flexibility as possible. This is an integral part of the project’s design because it allows first-hand, ethnographic insight into the situated emotive and sensory experience of Haptic-based religion. Undertaking ethnographic studies of living polytheistic faith communities will allow me to build a picture of how practitioners of polytheistic religions undertake varied, overlapping relationships with a variety of gods. This valuable data will allow me to build a model of a networked community structure, which can then be applied to ancient material and textual evidence.
Planned Dissemination
1. Presentation of the work at conferences, workshops, and seminars nationally and internationally will test and help develop the project’s findings throughout the fellowship. This will include presentations at the Society of Classical Studies, Classical Association, and Fédération internationale des associations d’études classiques.
2. Three peer-reviewed journal articles submitted to leading academic journals will allow me to further develop and refine the project results while showcasing the theoretical framework of HB. These include a) An extended treatment of Haptic Belief as a theoretical framework; b) A reappraisal of the role of women in ancient Greek religious practice; c) A case study on cults in Greek Southern Italy – thus the three articles together will cover the theoretical framework (a) and its application to a large dataset (b) and geographically restricted dataset (c).
3. Public dissemination through social media channels and via a dedicated open-access website; these will take the form of daily 1-3 minute videos covering aspects of the project, research trips to sites and museums, and monthly ‘Live’ Q&A sessions on TikTok (personal account: 36,000+ followers), cross-shared to Twitter (personal account: 9000+ followers). In addition, monthly blog posts, summaries of the project’s aims and methods, and articles on modern Hellenic polytheistic reconstructed practices.
3. The open-access digital exhibition, including videos of ‘guided tours’ around sites, photographs of sites and objects with short articles describing their proximity to the project, short videos of reconstructed religious practice
4. A monograph of the same title as the project, to be published by Liverpool University Press (‘New Voices in Ancient Religion’ series).
5. A sourcebook on Ancient Greek Religion, to be submitted to Blackwell (‘Sourcebooks in Ancient History’ series). The sourcebook will have two primary audiences: teachers and students of ancient Greek religion; practising Hellenic Polytheists. The proposal and manuscript will be submitted in the second half of the fellowship.
6. Organisation of and participation in an international conference on the nexus of public and personal religion in the ancient Mediterranean, which will expand upon a central theme of the broader project, with the conference proceedings to be published as an edited volume.
7. A knowledge exchange partnership with Labrys Community and other Hellenic Polytheists, as identified during the project. In the first instance, this will include documentation of their religious practice and several publications (sole and co-authored with members) relating to the practices and links between ancient and modern Greek polytheism.
There is now a prevalence of studies of ancient Greek religion which acknowledge the role of individual and community belief in ancient Greek religion, as well as several large-scale reinterpretations of ancient Roman religion. Despite this, a holistic reinterpretation of ancient Greek religious practice using cutting-edge methodologies has not yet been undertaken. Accordingly, though numerous scholars have acknowledged the importance of personal belief within ancient religious practice, studies typically adhere to the standard historical narrative that centres on the polis as the base religious unit from which all religious and ritual practice stems. Without appropriately examining personal belief and its interaction with public religious practices, our view of the religious landscape in ancient Greece will always be incomplete. Moreover, the view of polis-centred religion has been advanced by theoretical frameworks focusing on the orthopraxic, or’ right doing’, nature of ancient Greek religious practice. By utilising theoretical advancements in sensoriality, emotionality, and methods from the Cognitive Science of Religion, this project will rectify this oversight through its interdisciplinary approach to belief, faith, religious practice, and ritual in archaic and classical Greece and particularly by the employment of a specific theoretical framework, Haptic Belief, that I have developed specifically to integrate public religious practice with personal belief in historical contexts. This framework will be widely applicable to other studies of the ancient world and other historical disciplines.
[1] C Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘What is Polis Religion?,’ ‘Further Aspects of Polis Religion’ in Oxford Readings in Greek Religion, ed. Richard Buxton (Oxford: 2000) 1-37, 38-55.
[2] For example: E Eidinow, Envy, Poison, and Death: Women on Trial in Classical Athens (Oxford: 2016); F Graf, "Individual and Common Cult: Epigraphic Reflections," in The Individual in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. J Rüpke (Oxford: 2013) 115-135; J Kindt, "Personal Religion: A Productive Category for the Study of Ancient Greek Religion?," The Journal of Hellenic Studies 135 (2015) 35-50; E Eidinow and J Kindt, "Introduction," in The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion, ed. E Eidinow and J Kindt (Oxford: 2015) 1-11; J Rüpke, "Individualization and Individuation as Concepts for Historical Research," in The individual in the religions of the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. J Rüpke (Oxford: 2013) 3-38; KA Rask, "Devotionalism, Material Culture, and the Personal in Greek Religion," Kernos 29, no. 29 (2016) 9-40.
[3] e.g. Kindt, "Personal Religion." (n. 2)
[4] e.g. J Bremmer, "Manteis, Magic, Mysteries and Mythography: Mess Margins of Polis Religion," Kernos 23, no. 13-35 (2010) 13-35; J Kindt, "Polis Religion – A Critical Appreciation," Kernos, no. 22 (2009) 9-34.
[5] E Mackin Roberts, "Weaving for Athena: The Arrhephoroi, Panathenaia, and Mundane Acts as Religious Devotion," Journal for Hellenic Religion 12 (2019) 61-84.
[6] E Mackin Roberts, "Weaving for Athena” (n. 5); E Mackin Roberts, "Procession and Representation on the Parthenon Frieze: A Haptic Response," (forthcoming).
[7] E Mackin Roberts, Underworld Gods in Ancient Greek Religion: Death and Reciprocity (London: Routledge, 2020), 12.
[8] D Chidester, "Haptics of the Heart: The Sense of Touch in American Religion and Culture," Culture and Religion 1, no. 1 (2000): 62.
[9] Arist. Eth. Nic. 2.1.5 (1103a-b).
[10] G Lynch, "Object Theory: Toward an Intersubjective, Mediated, and Dynamic Theory of Religion," in Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief, ed. D Morgan (London, 2010), 53.
[11] C Toren, "Making History: The Significance of Childhood Cognition for a Comparative Anthropology of Mind," Man 28, no. 3 (1993): 467.
[12] This project purposefully approaches ‘the divine’ from the position of a believer. This is not to negate the experience of the non-believer in an embedded and structural religious practice in which everyone must participate – in fact, this will be an important question that the project addresses.
It is easiest to study ancient Greek religion from an etic position, which privileges public practices over personal belief; this is predominantly due to our distance from ancient people and the issues inherent in studying the ancient past. It has been enabled by the prevalence of theoretical frameworks such as Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood’s Polis religion theory.[1] This theory posits that all religious practice is predicated on the polis (plural poleis, ‘city-states’). Within this framework, all religion, from privately held beliefs of individuals to large scale festivals at panhellenic sanctuaries, was mediated through the political entity of a person polis. At this time, the Greek world was made up of hundreds of independent poleis that were loosely connected by some shared culture, language, and religious practice. Thus, religion was ‘embedded’ within the political structure – that is, religion was deeply enmeshed with all other political, civic, and economic aspects of the city. Polis religion theorises that the most critical religious identity was based on citizenship, and the most important religious body was the city. Studies utilising this approach do not purposefully ignore the role of individual practices. Instead, they begin from the polis, where religion is primarily facilitated. Additionally, personal experiences are harder to reconstruct or interpret, even more so when we do not adequately understand the framework into which those individuals’ experiences fit.
Many of the studies that focus on polis-centred religion give us a framework within which to examine the individual in earnest. More recently, scholars have started to restate the importance of the individual,[2] even within the bounds of the polis. However, much of this work still presents studies based on the theory of polis religion, either with a simple acknowledgement of personal belief[3] or which offer a critique of polis religion in the context of individual faith.[4] While this has been a necessary step in the study of ancient religion, neither of these approaches captures the complexity of the interrelationship between public practice and personal belief. A complete picture of the religious landscape of Greece in the sixth to fourth centuries BCE requires a holistic re-examination of ancient Greek religion, encompassing both the public and personal spheres, with the individual as the foundation. This re-examination requires an entirely new theoretical framework.
Even at the most significant, politically motivated civic festivals, some individuals would have felt deeply devotional. The multitude of ideas and experiences expressed during these festivals would have ranged from deep piety to uninterested boredom. People do not learn religious ideology only during formal education but also through interpersonal relationships – relationships filled with emotion and sensation. My research into the young girls who serve Athena Polias (‘of the city’) has demonstrated this.[5] BBB will trace these personal experiences of public religion. In this project, I will look for the experiences of, for instance, the young girls who wove the dress offered to Athena, the young man training for victory at the games in honour of Zeus Olympias, and the politician who travels to Delphi as a sacred envoy to seek the god’s wisdom. Each of these individuals participates in an act of public religion. However, the things and words they leave behind reveal something about their personal beliefs, ideas, and feelings about the gods and their faith. In tracing the material remains of these beliefs, this project will give a new understanding of the religious – and therefore everyday – lives of individuals in ancient Greece.
Ancient Greek polytheism inherently contains a significant degree of individual autonomy in creating a bricolage of religious experiences through participation in various religious communities (rather than a single ‘church’, for further, see below). The interaction between, and interdependence of, the public and personal is not trivial but vital to our understanding of the function of religion in ancient Greek culture. However, such a study cannot be conducted solely from an etic position. I have therefore developed a new theoretical framework for studying ancient religion that also accounts for the emic position of the insider: Haptic Belief (HB).[6]
People’s experiences and interactions are delineated and enhanced by the objects, spaces, and traditions they encounter in their everyday world and the sensations and feelings of everyday life focused through the lens of religious practices. This occurs in three connected but distinct ways. The first is through personal belief, which cannot be perfectly replicated from person to person, but which hangs together through a system of coherences (that is, that people share common understandings about what things mean). The second is that ancient Greek religion is predominantly orthopraxic, or ‘right doing’. When one behaves correctly, they are accepted, regardless of their personal beliefs. Finally, religious communities are not static but fluid because ancient Greek religion allows individuals to retain a certain amount of autonomy in crafting their religious practice by participating in various public and private cults. Belonging in a religious community is similarly not a static experience – as one might belong to a single church, synagogue, or mosque. Thus, religious participation in the ancient Greek world becomes a bricolage of networked experiences, thoughts, beliefs, and practices. As I made clear in my 2020 monograph, Underworld Gods in Ancient Greek Religion: Death and Reciprocity, ‘communities formed around religious practice in the Greek world could exist in several overlapping ways, and individuals would necessarily belong to multiple different religious communities.[7] While a political identity is required for participation in some religious communities, others require different kinds of identity. These might include households and families, neighbourhoods, specific age or gender requirements, or more broadly encompassing like ‘Greek speaking’.
Objectives
BBB has four key objectives, which are as follows: 1) to explore the nexus of public and personal religious practice in ancient Greece, focusing on the period roughly 700-323 BCE; 2) to reveal how personal practice is integral to public religion; 3) to present a new theoretical framework for the study of ancient religious practice which will be available for use in broader contexts, both relating to other religious landscapes (e.g. Rome, Near Eastern contexts), and other socio-cultural aspects (e.g. politics, trade relationships); 4) to investigate how modern Hellenic polytheism can reveal sensory and emotional aspects of ancient religious worship.
Specific objectives relating to the branches of the project
Believing: To what extent is ‘personal’ and ‘public’ religious belief (and non-belief) co-dependant in an ancient polytheistic context? How does public religion impact personal belief? For instance, what kinds of personal religious experiences can be found through evidence of large-scale public festivals that are predominantly political? The question of how we can map personal belief amongst ancient populations has occupied scholars of ancient religion over the last decade. This part of the project will examine individual religious experiences, both in large and small-scale religious practices that are both public and private. Through investigation into situated and object-based practices, I will map the experiences of worshippers onto the emotive and sensory landscape of religious practice (including comparative studies with modern Hellenic polytheistic practices, see below). This section will examine belief and how we can discuss faith in the context of ancient Greek religion (where we cannot, for example, undertake direct ethnographic studies).
Indicative Case Study: Examining the religious, emotive, and sensory experiences of the two elite young girls who live on the Athenian Acropolis for a year in service to Athena’ Of the City’, in juxtaposition to the broader group of girls whose bodies are turned into ritual implements during ‘rites of passage’ undertaken at the cults of Artemis in the outskirts of Attic territory, including a consideration of the very specific and individual faith profile of girls who may undertake both ritual practices.
Behaving: How does the religious and non-religious behaviour of individuals impact the way that religion works in practice at the polis level, in smaller communities such as families and neighbourhoods, and in larger administrative and non-administrative centres of the ancient Greek world, including groups of federated poleis that share sanctuaries or at panhellenic sanctuaries open to all Greek speakers? This includes political, civic, military, economic, and community behaviours and behaviours we might consider more purely religions. Examples of the former involve learning ornate personal dedications in public view of holding elaborate and expensive funerary processions. In contrast, examples of the latter might include private households of daily individual worship. This section will examine how personal religion can be distinguished from public practices and what happens when those lines are blurred. I will examine the role of audience(s) in the function of personal dedications in the broader religious landscape. Finally, I will look at nonbelievers in ancient polytheistic practices and why orthopraxic behaviour is equally or perhaps more critical than orthodoxic belief.
Indicative Case Study: The largest body of material evidence for religious practice in the ancient Greek world comprises hundreds of thousands of small votive offerings left by individuals in publicly accessible sanctuaries. These are both, then, both private andpublic religious offerings. How do we account for the multi-layered audiences of these offerings, including the divine, the individual or group making the offerings, and other community members who encounter these offerings during their own worship? What is the difference between ‘publicly private’ rituals such as those that take place at public sanctuaries and the ‘privately private’ rituals which take place in households or closed-off community groups with no opportunity for outsiders to witness (either the ritual itself or the material remains of the ritual)?
Belonging: To what extent is public religion based on the idea of belonging to a community rather than a system of religious belief? What kinds of communities impacted religious belief and behaviour? In this section, I will investigate how religious participation promoted inclusion in public and private spaces. I will focus on political and military communities, public religious communities, and private religious communities with large-scale voluntary membership.
Indicative Case Study: Cases of individuals who might otherwise be considered ‘outsiders’ being included within communities for reasons of religious practice. For example, a Thracian man living in Eleusis in the mid-fourth century BCE was rewarded for his commitment to the local gods and festivals with financial and social privileges. These privileges were inscribed on a large tablet erected by the local municipal council in the area of the main sanctuary of the area – this demonstrates intentional religious behaviour leading to a direct social and fiscal gain and community inclusion, bearing out the argument that ancient Greek religion operated between civic and personal components.
Theoretical Framework
In its simplest form, haptics refers to touch. More than this, though, haptics ‘refers to the work of the hands – handling, caressing, grasping, manipulating, hitting, striking, and so on – as instruments of knowledge’.[8] Doing, as Aristotle noted,[9] is instrumental to learning. Doing with the body not only creates new knowledge but reinforces old knowledge. Moreover, as doing is instrumental to learning, it is also instrumental to teaching. In many modern religions, children learn religious activity through play – a form of low-stakes doing.[10] As Christina Toren comments, ‘our cognitive processes are constituted through our embodied engagement in the world.’[11] Knowledge-making in religious contexts is an inherently dynamic process necessitated by multi-directional relationships between the body and mind of the individual, the collective body and mind of the community, the situated environment, and the divine. The primary relationship is formed between the individual and the divine regardless of the number of intermediary layers; these layers – the community, environment, or other individuals – shape both the individual and the divine[12] in ways that neither can be independent from. That is, our experience of the world is facilitated by our experiences through the world. This facilitation is led primarily by sensory feedback. In this way, haptics relates not only to touch but to the feedback of touch: the things we use, the energy we expend making and moving, the environment we move in and through. Ancient Greek religion is both embodied and situated, and therefore needs to be examined in an embodied and situated way.
Thus, HB looks at how individuals experience religion physically, emotionally, and sensorily. HB is grounded in the material world and how individuals relate to it. Our understanding of material things shapes our understanding of the world. Using material culture as the foundation for studying the world can enable us to reconstruct ‘history from below’ – that is, the history of the everyday. Using and adapting material culture enables me to conduct material based ethnographic-style studies. In the absence of direct ethnographic studies, this allows us to investigate religion as it was experienced through the physical and literary remains of the culture. HB examines religion as it is ‘lived by people. This approach can help reconstruct ancient people’s lives by examining how they experienced and interacted with the world. Alongside applying a theoretical framework to the historical material, I will be undertaking a knowledge exchange partnership, culminating in a significant body of new research, with communities of modern Hellenic Polytheists, particularly those that identify as ‘Reconstructionist’. These communities, such as the Labrys Community of Athens, seek to reconstruct ancient religious practices as closely as possible. This is a heretofore underused opportunity for scholars of ancient religion to investigate the sensory and emotive dimensions of religious practice focused on the ancient Greek gods.
I have undertaken two pilot studies applying HB, with a third nearly complete. These will form the basis of the main project. The first, ‘Weaving for Athena: The Arrhephoroi, Panathenaia, and Mundane Acts as Religious Devotion’ (2019) looks at the process of weaving the dress dedicated to Athena in Athens annually at the Panathenaia, a festival designed to reassert the relationship between Athena and the Athenians, and which is politically motivated community ritual. The dress is made over a period of nine months by a group of women, whose bodies and time become the implements of secretive ritual practice. The second, ‘Procession and Representation on the Parthenon Frieze: A Haptic Response’ (forthcoming), examines the process of procession, using the Panathenaic procession as a case study. This study examines the way that different parts of the population may have experienced the same ritual in vastly different ways (e.g. the young girls who carried ritual implements at the beginning, some of whom were citizen girls and some resident foreigners, the magistrates who processed in their official capacities, the body of citizen men who joined the procession at the end, the audience of the procession). Finally, ‘Situated Ritual and Political Change in Fifth-Century Athenian Cults of Artemis: A View Over the Harbour’ (forthcoming) presents a re-examination of the use of site-situated experience in rituals dedicated to Artemis at her sanctuary overlooking Athens’s harbour and how the urbanisation of the area during the fifth century changed both the religious and political implications of the site and its rituals.
This project grows out of previous research conducted initially for my 2020 monograph Underworld Gods in Ancient Greek Religion, with a theoretical framework (HB) that has been refined in pilot studies listed above (see Theoretical Framework). Echoing the complex nature of religious practice, I will undertake a multi-layered analysis of the appropriate evidence, including historical and archival research, during which I will conduct a sustained analysis of the ancient textual, visual, and material evidence. This work aims to build a comprehensive dataset of religious practices across the Greek world in the archaic and classical periods. This dataset will be used to compile the sourcebook (see Dissemination Plan below). It will be managed through a dedicated Data Management Plan. This will be supplemented by site situated research trips to Greece and Italy undertaken throughout the fellowship period. Researching situated knowledge can be enhanced not only by visiting sites and undertaking approximations of, for example, long processional walks, particularly when done at appropriate times of the year.
This site-situated research will facilitate the close attention necessary to comprehensively analyse the project’s sources, allowing for the study of emotive and sensory aspects of religious practice that come together to establish religious communities in the ancient Greek world. I will consult contemporaneous textual, epigraphical, and visual material as part of the project’s primary analysis, predominantly using printed resources and online databases (e.g. Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum) and collections of inscriptional evidence (e.g. Inscriptiones Graecae, Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum), to conduct crucial contextual analysis. The analysis of religious sites and collated images, objects, and texts examined during my archival research will complement an ongoing survey of relevant secondary literature to be updated through the fellowship. This includes scholarship focused on the ancient Greek religious landscape and interdisciplinary studies of histories of religious practice, recent texts exploring intersections between emotion, sensation, material culture, and identity, Cognitive Science of Religion (including historical applications of CSR), work on religion and situated experience, social geography, and spatial sociology. In synthesising these varying intellectual approaches, the project will provide an innovative and interdisciplinary examination that is not limited by theoretical frameworks prevalent in the study of ancient history and the discipline of Classics.
As outlined above, the project adopts an innovative multidisciplinary approach to the study of ancient Greek religion. My novel theoretical framework, HB, adopts and adapts methods from various historical and ancient historical disciplines, cognitive science of religion and psychology, sociology, anthropology, and religious studies. In doing so, the project establishes a vital dialogue between often discrete disciplinary approaches. Material culture and site situated experience embodies – and is embedded within – religious practices, which occur through participation in the groups and institutions that make up the city’s civic, social, and private spheres. These groups share some, but not all, of their symbolic grammar and vocabulary, giving a person the ability to transfer concepts from one group into another without significant dissonance. HB differs from other material or sensorial methods because it crucially describes how the body becomes an object in the course of religious practice to define the embodied nature of religious practice in a system that is predominantly driven by tradition.
As part of the project, I will build a collaborative worship partnership with various communities of modern Hellenic polytheists to research and restage several key festivals and rites associated with the project. The purpose of this partnership is not to faithfully recreate the conditions of ancient religious practices but to investigate the emotive and sensory aspects of worship focused on the ancient Greek pantheon by engaging with adherents to Hellenic polytheism. Reconstruction has long been an accepted approach in archaeology and history research, but the controlled and academic reconstruction of events to investigate emotional and sensory responses is innovative. In the first instance, I will be approaching the Labrys Religious Community, a group that regularly practices Hellenic polytheists based in Athens who undertake personal and public religious activities. As the goal is collaborative knowledge exchange, I will approach this aspect of the project with as much flexibility as possible. This is an integral part of the project’s design because it allows first-hand, ethnographic insight into the situated emotive and sensory experience of Haptic-based religion. Undertaking ethnographic studies of living polytheistic faith communities will allow me to build a picture of how practitioners of polytheistic religions undertake varied, overlapping relationships with a variety of gods. This valuable data will allow me to build a model of a networked community structure, which can then be applied to ancient material and textual evidence.
Planned Dissemination
1. Presentation of the work at conferences, workshops, and seminars nationally and internationally will test and help develop the project’s findings throughout the fellowship. This will include presentations at the Society of Classical Studies, Classical Association, and Fédération internationale des associations d’études classiques.
2. Three peer-reviewed journal articles submitted to leading academic journals will allow me to further develop and refine the project results while showcasing the theoretical framework of HB. These include a) An extended treatment of Haptic Belief as a theoretical framework; b) A reappraisal of the role of women in ancient Greek religious practice; c) A case study on cults in Greek Southern Italy – thus the three articles together will cover the theoretical framework (a) and its application to a large dataset (b) and geographically restricted dataset (c).
3. Public dissemination through social media channels and via a dedicated open-access website; these will take the form of daily 1-3 minute videos covering aspects of the project, research trips to sites and museums, and monthly ‘Live’ Q&A sessions on TikTok (personal account: 36,000+ followers), cross-shared to Twitter (personal account: 9000+ followers). In addition, monthly blog posts, summaries of the project’s aims and methods, and articles on modern Hellenic polytheistic reconstructed practices.
3. The open-access digital exhibition, including videos of ‘guided tours’ around sites, photographs of sites and objects with short articles describing their proximity to the project, short videos of reconstructed religious practice
4. A monograph of the same title as the project, to be published by Liverpool University Press (‘New Voices in Ancient Religion’ series).
5. A sourcebook on Ancient Greek Religion, to be submitted to Blackwell (‘Sourcebooks in Ancient History’ series). The sourcebook will have two primary audiences: teachers and students of ancient Greek religion; practising Hellenic Polytheists. The proposal and manuscript will be submitted in the second half of the fellowship.
6. Organisation of and participation in an international conference on the nexus of public and personal religion in the ancient Mediterranean, which will expand upon a central theme of the broader project, with the conference proceedings to be published as an edited volume.
7. A knowledge exchange partnership with Labrys Community and other Hellenic Polytheists, as identified during the project. In the first instance, this will include documentation of their religious practice and several publications (sole and co-authored with members) relating to the practices and links between ancient and modern Greek polytheism.
There is now a prevalence of studies of ancient Greek religion which acknowledge the role of individual and community belief in ancient Greek religion, as well as several large-scale reinterpretations of ancient Roman religion. Despite this, a holistic reinterpretation of ancient Greek religious practice using cutting-edge methodologies has not yet been undertaken. Accordingly, though numerous scholars have acknowledged the importance of personal belief within ancient religious practice, studies typically adhere to the standard historical narrative that centres on the polis as the base religious unit from which all religious and ritual practice stems. Without appropriately examining personal belief and its interaction with public religious practices, our view of the religious landscape in ancient Greece will always be incomplete. Moreover, the view of polis-centred religion has been advanced by theoretical frameworks focusing on the orthopraxic, or’ right doing’, nature of ancient Greek religious practice. By utilising theoretical advancements in sensoriality, emotionality, and methods from the Cognitive Science of Religion, this project will rectify this oversight through its interdisciplinary approach to belief, faith, religious practice, and ritual in archaic and classical Greece and particularly by the employment of a specific theoretical framework, Haptic Belief, that I have developed specifically to integrate public religious practice with personal belief in historical contexts. This framework will be widely applicable to other studies of the ancient world and other historical disciplines.
[1] C Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘What is Polis Religion?,’ ‘Further Aspects of Polis Religion’ in Oxford Readings in Greek Religion, ed. Richard Buxton (Oxford: 2000) 1-37, 38-55.
[2] For example: E Eidinow, Envy, Poison, and Death: Women on Trial in Classical Athens (Oxford: 2016); F Graf, "Individual and Common Cult: Epigraphic Reflections," in The Individual in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. J Rüpke (Oxford: 2013) 115-135; J Kindt, "Personal Religion: A Productive Category for the Study of Ancient Greek Religion?," The Journal of Hellenic Studies 135 (2015) 35-50; E Eidinow and J Kindt, "Introduction," in The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion, ed. E Eidinow and J Kindt (Oxford: 2015) 1-11; J Rüpke, "Individualization and Individuation as Concepts for Historical Research," in The individual in the religions of the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. J Rüpke (Oxford: 2013) 3-38; KA Rask, "Devotionalism, Material Culture, and the Personal in Greek Religion," Kernos 29, no. 29 (2016) 9-40.
[3] e.g. Kindt, "Personal Religion." (n. 2)
[4] e.g. J Bremmer, "Manteis, Magic, Mysteries and Mythography: Mess Margins of Polis Religion," Kernos 23, no. 13-35 (2010) 13-35; J Kindt, "Polis Religion – A Critical Appreciation," Kernos, no. 22 (2009) 9-34.
[5] E Mackin Roberts, "Weaving for Athena: The Arrhephoroi, Panathenaia, and Mundane Acts as Religious Devotion," Journal for Hellenic Religion 12 (2019) 61-84.
[6] E Mackin Roberts, "Weaving for Athena” (n. 5); E Mackin Roberts, "Procession and Representation on the Parthenon Frieze: A Haptic Response," (forthcoming).
[7] E Mackin Roberts, Underworld Gods in Ancient Greek Religion: Death and Reciprocity (London: Routledge, 2020), 12.
[8] D Chidester, "Haptics of the Heart: The Sense of Touch in American Religion and Culture," Culture and Religion 1, no. 1 (2000): 62.
[9] Arist. Eth. Nic. 2.1.5 (1103a-b).
[10] G Lynch, "Object Theory: Toward an Intersubjective, Mediated, and Dynamic Theory of Religion," in Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief, ed. D Morgan (London, 2010), 53.
[11] C Toren, "Making History: The Significance of Childhood Cognition for a Comparative Anthropology of Mind," Man 28, no. 3 (1993): 467.
[12] This project purposefully approaches ‘the divine’ from the position of a believer. This is not to negate the experience of the non-believer in an embedded and structural religious practice in which everyone must participate – in fact, this will be an important question that the project addresses.